DDESS District News

Ramey School Receives National Recognition

PEACHTREE CITY, GA — June 4, 2012 — Dr. Linda Curtis, Acting Director and Area Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment for the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools (DDESS) and Department of Defense Dependents Schools, Cuba, (DoDDS-Cuba) learned today that Ramey School, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, in the New York, Virginia, Puerto Rico District, is being honored by The Globe Program, an international hands-on-science and education program.

Ramey School is being honored for outstanding achievement by The GLOBE Program for successful completion of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded From Learning to Research (L2R) project. The goal of L2R is to create a gold standard model for teacher-student-scientist interaction using 21st Century technologies.

Dr. Donato Cuadrado, Ramey School Principal said, “Mr. Richard Roettger is a strong teacher leader. He has worked for years with The GLOBE Program providing dozens of students with real-life field experience to enhance their learning in the science domain. His and our students’ contributions to The GLOBE Program make us all very proud.”

“This is a tremendous honor for us,” said Richard Roettger, a GLOBE teacher at Ramey School. “Working with The GLOBE Program on this project has been very rewarding for our students. Through GLOBE, our students aren’t just talking about science––they’re doing science. The next generation of scientists are learning and growing right before our very eyes.”

The L2R teachers and students are a small subset of schools involved in The GLOBE Program’s Student Climate Research Campaign (SCRC). The SCRC aims to engage students in measuring, investigating, and understanding the climate system in their local communities and around the world. Schools from the United States as well as many other countries are currently participating in the SCRC.

In addition to students submitting climate projects to the L2R virtual Student Conference, Mr. Roettger completed extensive training and professional development in Earth System Science, 21st Century skills and technologies, and Inquiry Based Learning. Roettger has been named an L2R Fellow for excellent work over the past school year while students at Ramey School completed a locally relevant climate project using GLOBE protocols.

“These teachers and students are helping us to create a model for teacher-student-scientist interaction using 21st Century technologies,” said Julie Malmberg, GLOBE Science and Education Project Manager. “The students are outside collecting their own data, analyzing and recording the data, and then creating high quality scientific research projects. Along the way, they are also talking with students and scientists from around the world.”

ABOUT GLOBE

GLOBE is an international science and education program that connects a network of students, teachers and scientists from around the world to better understand, sustain and improve Earth’s environment at local, regional and global scales. By engaging students in hands-on learning of Earth system science, GLOBE is an innovative way for teachers to get students of all ages excited about scientific discovery locally and globally. To date, more than 23 million measurements have been contributed to the GLOBE database, creating meaningful, standardized, global research-quality data sets that can be used in support of student and professional scientific research. Since beginning operations in 1995, over 58,000 trained teachers and 1.5 million students in 112 countries have participated in GLOBE. For more information or to become involved, visit www.globe.gov.

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